China now has more supercomputers without using US chips

It has been declared that a Chinese supercomputer that is built using domestic chip is now the world’s fastest.

It highlights China’s recent advances in the creation of such systems as well as China’s waning reliance on US semiconductor technology.

The Sunway TaihuLight takes the top spot from previous record-holder Tianhe-2 that is also located in China, and more than triples the latter’s speed. Being number one, it is capable of 93 quadrillion calculations per second, known as petaflops and roughly five times more powerful than the speediest US system, which ranked third worldwide now.

Though the TaihuLight is built from Chinese semiconductors, Jack Dongarra, professor at the University of Tennessee and creator of the measurement system used to rank the world’s supercomputers told Bloomberg, “It’s not based on an existing architecture. They built it themselves.

“This is a system that has Chinese processors.” Dongarra said.

The TaihuLight comprised of some 41,000 chips that has 260 processor cores each. This makes a total of 10.65 million cores compared to 560,000 cores in America’s top machine. It has 1.3 petabytes of memory used for the entire machine. (it is much less powerful 10-petaflop K supercomputer uses 1.4 petabytes of RAM).

This means of it’s unusually energy efficient as 15.3 megawatts of power is less than the 17.8 megawatts used by 33-petaflop Tianhe-2.

According to its creators, TaihuLight will be used in manufacturing, life science and earth system modeling fields.

Supercomputers were thought by both US and China to be integral for scientific research and national security. Such systems are used for variety of tasks, that includes civilian work like weather forecasting and product design, and it can be more useful for high-stakes research including cybersecurity and nuclear weaponry.